Archief - SOCOM 4: Special Forces

Zipper couldn't find enemies so they introduced E-Tags
Just because your joke QA testers and focus groups can't find eachother in 1v1 or 2v2 situations doesn't mean you should introduce e tags. That's what GunHotting was for.

"Mr exPURiEncE" Travis Steiner wants us to move around the map like Solid Snake
Instead of running around the map like a skilled player using gunhott and common sense, Steiner wants socom players to navigate the map super slow, poking out of corners as if we're playing a single player game like Gamer12789 and get voted out for playing like a dumbass.

Zipper cannot comprehend the idea of different crosshairs per weapon type
Add a dot for Assault Rifles/SMG's. Change the crosshairs for shotuns/snipers. How hard is that to understand? Everyone knows a shotgun/sniper wont give pinpoint precise headshots, we're not stupid That doesn't mean you should remove the centre dot for the accurate weapons.

Still can't fix PTT and made even worse *Update*: Made further worse

PTT has been made even worse. You now press Up on the D pad once and are forced into a 10 second period where you are holding down the mic. Instead of giving that quick and precise callout and getting off the mic so someone else can get on, you'll have to wait 10 seconds.


Update: Roper has confirmed multiple people will be able to talk at once. So now we have a button that triggers Open Mics.

Cover brought back thanks to Community Day Casuals

Some of the casuals who attended the community day suggested the cover system be brought into classic mode and now it is. 5-10 random casuals are now the voice of tens of thousands? Gamer12789 will be pleased.

No Grenade Arc / No D-Pad Lean / No Classic View / No Pistols

Too hard for Zipper to implement so won't be in S4.

Zipper think Match-Making is the way forward!

Zipper seem to think throwing you into a random room creates a better community. If you're being thrown into a new room with new players every single game, how is that creating a community? Playing with a group of individuals often is how a community is made.

Socom is now 7 Rounds

I wonder which genius suggested this change. Ever heard of clan wars Zipper?

Socom In the EU is Delayed
Don't expect socom to ship the same time as it does in the states. Shijima (the EU socom producer of Confrontation) is working on S4 too. So expect delays.




All of the changes point towards one thing, giving the casual player more power to compete. Week by week more of the skill factor is being taken out and being replaced by the scrub factor which Steiner and his merry men of ignorant fools seem to think is "Team Tactics".

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Crosshairs: Have been enlarged for beta, middle dot will not ship with game, still considering it

D-Pad Lean: Will not launch with the game, however the cover system has now been implemented into Classic Mode

Classic Game Modes: Suppression loses weapons on map, both of the other modes get lowered interactions and one goes from 3 pts required to 2

PTT: Will remain on UP because running out of room on controller. However you only need to tap it once and get 10 seconds to talk, regardless if you need 2 or 10 seconds
Uhh what if we need quick 1 second shout outs?

Pistols: Will not be in the game

Lobbies: Will not be in the game, will have matchmaking

Player Names: Has been lowered for beta

Camera Angle: Will not launch with game, looking at options for different angles down the road

Demolition: Will not launch with game, hinted that it will appear in DLC

Rounds: 7 rounds is the maximum amount of rounds

Grenade Arch: Will not be in the game, say they are running out of room on controller

E-tags: Will be in the game - how is someone suppose to win a 3v1?


So basically out of all our complaints, we get bigger X-hairs and lowered player names. Yipee

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Few things to touch on:

Extended mags does uneven the playing field you don't need more bullet damage to cause that. Just ask the newer player when he's reloading after 20 shots while a guy with more playtime is still unloading on him with 10 more in his clip with the same weapon. Thats not "enhancing the player's skill" thats "artificially enhancing the player's skills"

The crosshair, no classic crosshair with centering dot because not all guns have the same kind of accuracy. Who cares we don't need a universal crosshair, you can have different ones according to weapon. If you will recall in the old Socoms the shotguns that sprayed lead had a square crosshair with a center circle with no dot. You don't need to come up with a universal spray and pray crosshair for all wepaons. Tailor the crosshairs to have more precision based according to gun in use.

Alot of talk of why they are doing things with little talk of trying to make changes to please the fans. Alot of "we're still looking into it, maybe at some point down the road". If the sales flop its too late to scramble to get things in there people will pass on it and not look back.

Demolition is a maybe at some point, well maybe i'll buy the game at some point then but probably not on release date. You don't want to look in the past for game modes but you had no problem looking in the past to MAG to help create these game modes.

More talk about the game they wanted to make preventing them from deciding on things like D-pad lean and grenade arcs. The things is the classic mode should of allowed for us to have such options without them compromising the game they wanted to make in SP and "standard mode" . Why make a classic mode for us if you went and overhauled that for a broader market to? If you took out grenade arc to enhance airstrikes but there is no airstrike in classic mode why can't grenade arc be used in its place?

d-pad lean i think won't come back either way cause they sounded super excited that some guys said just give the cover system in classic if there's no lean. With the thumbs up for that option you know they'll use that shortcut and bury the d-pad lean idea forever.

Camera view, ok so you said this is going to change at some point but i still can't believe the explanation about how the close view is more immersive and gritty. What that translates to for actual people who play games is disorienting and clunky. You have to be a gamer to understand what is cool as opposed to what sounds like it might be cool for a 5 year old to look at. You also have to understand that 3rd person fans like third person games to see more around their character. If you're going to have a very restricting view then just make it FPS. Don't give a third person view that strips away everything that makes third person great and give us the same FPS tunnel vision affect.

Enemy tags is not what you needed to decide rounds. What you needed to do and what we been telling you since 2005 is that when you make larger then life 32 player maps that causes too many draw outs and camping. All you needed to do was stick to smaller map designs. In Socom 1 and 2 most rounds did come to a conclusion where as your huge maps in the later games caused to matches that ended 2 to 1 draw out borefests after 11 rounds. You talked about how excited the players seemed when they had a showdown in your office. What you don't know is that its nothing compared to the excitement had in the past when a showdown happened suddenly and unexpectedly sometimes resulting in a comeback from down 4 or 5 to 1.

Pistols not coming back is just a slap in the face. You also show that you want to sell this as a team based game only as a PR line when you are actually stripping out so much of the team importance. Every player used to have their role now you want to encourage just taking weapons for any distance to encourage everyone to just kind of go out and do their own thing and not worry as much about the team or rely on everyone have their own role.

It seems like you guys are basically saying "well...we don't need the fanbase so yeah we heard ya but we got a new audience coming so what you want is not any sort of priority. Maybe later if we feel like it"

It's just a shame that we have some guys who have actually worked on Socoms but were never fans of Socom. If there was any real actual gameplay fans I can't see how we got stuck with the least Socom features ever in a game. Everytime they slap this franchise in the face with poor changes and we think they can't do any worse the next time they prove us 100% wrong and slap us twice as hard. This company is just anti-fanbase. Never seen a company who just really goes out of its way to make sure they have the least possible chance of pleasing their long time fans.

I'll try the beta to be fair and make sure I've really tried every possible avenue to give this game a chance but it's pretty clear how this is going to go. If you're smart Zipper you better limit the beta time for each player to like 3 days so they don't find out the game is boring after a week and all pass on buying it.

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First off let me just say that I'm so happy that only about 10min max was spent on MAG. Finally a Podcast on Socom!

Here is an in-depth breakdown. My few comments are in red. Feel free to leave you opinions and what not as I would LOVE to hear peoples thoughts on the info.
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First off there are 3 different game modes discussed:
Suppresion - Like old times.
Uplink - One team defends CPU's while another attacks. Kind of like headquarters in CoD.
Capture the Flag (can't remember exact name) - First team to capture the 3 points gets to attack a fourth point which is the enemy HQ and must proceed to capture that to win the game.

Am I they only one that thinks those are some pretty MAG-tastic game modes there? Seriously, that capture the flag is like STRAIGHT out of MAG for heavens sake!

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XP System:

XP system is standard MAG unlockable where you have to get up to a certain level (earn enough XP) to unlock a certain weapon.

You will have to earn enough XP with an individual weapon to unlock its attachments (or "mods").
The quote "Ability to change which one you have" makes me worried about being able to have multiple attachments at once. Needless to say if you can only have 1 attachment at a time, I don't think I'll be the only unhappy person on this forum.

The XP system will have a "Classic mode modifier" meaning you will earn XP in Classic just as fast as Standard mode even though you wont get kills as frequently while playing Classic mode.

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Damage System:

Damage system is standard and other guns will not be overpowered compared to others. Weapon Mod unlocks also will not upset the balance of weapon damage given this special damage system.

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Leader Boards:

With all the important things going on, why did they talk about this? If you really care about this then listen to the podcast yourself because I FF through.........

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Clan Match System:

You can make a clan with a max of 128 members.

Built in Clan Challenge System:

Leader or officer enters a lobby and forms a party to invite clan mates. Should you want, you could have multiple lobbys for your clan open at once. Must have a minimum of 4 players to challenge another clan. You will have the ability to remove people from your party if your an officer or leader.

When you get your party together you then "ready up" and receive a list of Clans you are currently able to challenge. Clan challenges are ranked and count towards your stats.

Ability to have "inter-clan challenges". Meaning members of the same clan can challenge eachother in an un-ranked game.

Game Modes for Clan Challenge:

You have a list of pre-set challenge types you could send to another clan. Example being Classic mode, Abandoned, supression, 7 rounds, 7min each.
Apparantly Zipper will be looking into what kind of challenges the community wants, much like their take on UCRR's. So basically they'll create challenges depending on what the community wants, and we wont be able to create our own.

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User Created Room Unranked Rooms and Zipper Ranked Rooms:

Ability to chose weapon sets and restrictions, respawn on or off, medic revive on and off, round number and time limit, game types and maps, number of players.

Also able to set Player movement speed, and damage settings (minimal, standard, max).

Keeping several settings and such under raps to surprise the community later on.

..........to surprise us............WHY!?

Zipper Created Ranked Rooms will have different setting such and types such as "Snipers Ally". This room would have bigger maps with only Snipers, higher damage, only smoke grenades. Also a mode called "Scrum", where its supression with no respawn, faster movement, higher damage, no sniper or grenades, 7 rounds that are 1 min each. Kind of like a "rushed" match.

.........why not just let us create are own ranked rooms instead of creating the weird lame things?????

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"How we have encorperated feedback into Socom 4":

Updated Crosshairs – They have put in bigger reticle with tick-marks. And they tried a center dot but will not be in when they ship with release. They find it isn't a solution for all the weapon classes and works great with accurate weapons (Once example they gave was a Sniper Rifle.....why would we need crosshairs for those? ) but dont give good feedback for spray weapons because the dot isn't an exact bullet location. Their going to continue looking into it and might pursue having another reticle for more accurate weapons via patch after release. “Relatively likely” is a quote on the chances for an option for different reticle later on. Lack of dot has nothing to do with weapon accuracy apparently.

Fire from the hip – You can fire from the hip without using OTS view. Used as a “lower scope mode”. Not all weapons are great at firing from the hip.

Movement Speed - “Goal was to create movement speed for classic that was closer to the older games” Classic has already been set for unique movement speed and has already been increased since community day. Specific strafe speed has also been increased for Classic and even a bit in the Standard mode as well.

Fixed name problem over character since community day. Moved them farther down.

Expect to see these changes in the Beta.

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Fixing Camera:

They are working on fixing the camera and moving it farther back, though these changes will not be finished in time for release.

........speechless...........speechless........... .

They are centering the camera so it isn't offset. There will only be one camera mode in the MP to "avoid bugs and glitches". Looking into adding a second option for a "more classic view" via patch after release.

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Other Topics:

"0% chance" of implementing pistols in Socom 4 at any time. This was a design choice for tactical flexibility. Players will therefore use special weapons like shotguns and SMG's more than they would otherwise. They didn't want players to be confined to certain parts of maps because of weapon type. “I've never heard anyone say they missed the pistols” (your obviously talking about Zipper employees ). Development focus is elsewhere and haven't they haven't captured motions for pistols and what not so the time it would take to implement these into game is just impossible. “Time wouldn't be worth it”

........to who?

“D-pad very unlikely to come in at any point”. In reference to community day people wanting cover mode in classic, they believe that people don't like cover mode because they haven't given it a chance.

Therefore Classic mode will have a cover mode BY DEFAULT.

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Radar Proximity and E-tags:

Radar and E-tags at the end of round – Radar in regular MP maps show enemy location depending on proximity, enemy locations will show outside spawn in Standard mode to cut down on spawn camping.

Classic Mode and E-tags - “We find people enjoy winning and losing and not trying to find someone for 5 min. An Enemy UAV passes in the last 2 min of the round that shows anyone left on the map. Have to play it before you judge, enhances the excitement. You could feel the energy in the room of people having good time and that is what matters, not what the little things they want changed and what not”

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Matchmaking and No Lobbies:

Why no lobbies and including matchmaking? - “The main goal is to get people in games fast. Our thought is that it strengthens community and people meet eachother”

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Demoltion:

Where is demolition and why is it not included in shipping? -
“From day 1, Socom 4 was all about moving forward and not looking behind. Honestly as a team the best thing for a franchise is to bring new things to the table."

The Development team was set to putting new game modes forward.

Though they do hear us, “But all I can say is that just because it isn't shipping with the game doesn't mean they wont see it”

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D-pad Up PTT:

Functions as a "tap" feature. Meaning you do not hold down the Up button to talk. You simply tap and it holds for 10 seconds.

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My finals thoughts:

I stopped giving comments early on because I couldn't find words to express my total and complete anger.

Promises and patches. Sounds all to familiar. Expect us to play $60 for a unfinished product.

Why is it you don't want to at least implement the changes EVERYONE wants?

I'm just..............well guys lets hear your opinions!

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